Delayed Reaction
by bisexualcharliedavis
Summary: Whumptober Day 11 - Scars Charlie was a left handed pupil in the 30s. Lucien is horrified by the realization. For some reason.


a/n: okay this one needs some warnings: Period typical child abuse, specifically towards a left handed character for being left handed. Normalization of said abuse by the vicitim. Otherwise, i'm still at it, just plugging along. I think this might spill out into next month, but i've accepted that. Otherwise, let me know what you think, of the fic, and of the idea of Charlie remaining left handed out of pure spite. it's a personal favourite head canon of mine.

"It's really not a big deal, doc," Charlie said, even as the doc was already prodding at the cut with a cotton bud dipped in antiseptic. It stung, and Charlie didn't have a very high tolerance for pain. It took a great deal of restraint not to rip his hand away. Even if it didn't hurt; he didn't exactly revel in the idea of someone touching his dominant hand. Just one of those weird quirks.

"It doesn't have to be a big deal to be an injury," Lucien assured him and smoothed a bandaid over the wound.

"I cut my hand slicing potatoes." He deadpanned, "I'm more concerned about the bloody potatoes I just left Mrs. Beazley with." Blake scoffed and turned his hand over to see where the blood had leaked off his palm and down the sides of his hands. Damn, he was going to have to clean up, the basin in the Doc's office looked like an absolute murder scene. How could one little cut bleed like a freaking geyser?

"What happened to your hand?" Blake asked, and Charlie watched in horror as his wide thumb smoothed across the thin pink mark on the back of his hand, 'There's a lot of them." He gasped and looked up at Charlie expecting some kind of tragedy to have befallen him. Charlie just blinked at him and said the obvious.

"I'm left-handed."

Blake blinked at him, looked down at the back of his hand, then back up at Charlie. He could practically see the cogs spinning around inside his head as he thought about it. Then he traced the much smaller marks along his fingers.

"They hit you." He said like it was something upsetting.

"They hit all the left-handed kids." He responded, and there had been three or four in his class. Much like him, they all left school with bleeding, swollen knuckles every day. One by one, they learned that writing with their left hand was Satan's work. Except him. Well, no. He knew exactly why they didn't want him to write with his left hand, he just kept doing it because he was stubborn.

"I didn't know they were still doing that in the forties." He said. He was encroaching on Charlie's space, not physically, but with his...Sympathy? He didn't know why he would bother, and he didn't really care for it.

"They're still doing it now." He said, "One of David's friends also had bloody knuckles when he came around. But he goes to Catholic school, so I guess you'd have to expect it."

"You went to a Catholic school?" Blake asked, surprised. Charlie had half a mind to lie and say of course he did, he won a scholarship. But the lie would fall apart the second anyone asked him about theology. He'd always found Church painfully boring and rarely bothered to learn much of what the preacher had to say.

"Nah. Just regular old public school." He said, "But it was full of Church teachers, and staff. Some of them just liked beating children though, never saw Mr. Vasily at Church but he was a mean bastard if you put a foot wrong."

Him and Mt Vasily used to go at it, as well as they could. Funny; before taking his class Charlie'd had a bit of an aptitude for maths. A mystery story with numbers, he'd think. But after that class, he'd never felt compelled to learn more about it than he had to pass his classes.

"That's horrible," Blake said, and his face showed it. His eyes were wide, mouth slightly agape. "They just...Hit you for being left-handed? With what?" He asked, bringing the hand he was still holding up to his eyes, and looking at the marks closer. It made him uncomfortable, and he pulled his hand away.

"Whatever. My religion teacher had a particularly beloved yardstick." He smirked, "When she realized that wasn't going to work, she started taping my hand to the back of my chair."

"Did your parents ever try to correct your writing?" He asked, voice dark and serious.

"No…?" He answered, but it came out raised at the end; like a question.

"Did they ever object?"

"Mum used to tell me to write with my other hand." He said, "But I almost dislocated my shoulder she asked them to put me in another class." He said, thoughtfully. Blake shook his head, and the light catches on the grey flecks in his blonde beard.

"I really thought that we would have stopped doing that." He said, finally. "I can't fathom hitting a child, for any reason."

"It's not a big deal, doc. Anway. I did kind of bring it on myself. If I'd just used my right hand they wouldn't have done it so long." For some reason, this makes him look even more horrified than before.

"It is a big deal." He says and takes hold of his hand again. This time, Charlie does not flinch away. "They shouldn't have hit you, and I'm sorry that you went through that. Education is so vital, and it's a shame that it was disrupted for you."

He blinked, once, and then again. He didn't know what to say for a moment because no one had ever said that to him before. It'd never even crossed his mind; that it was something done to him, not something he brought upon himself. And certainly, no one had ever said sorry. He settled on -

"No one ever told me that before."

"Well, someone should have." Blake's hands on his are so warm, and he doesn't pull away. "Tell me, do you suffer any long term effects from the repeated trauma?"

"My knuckles hurt when it gets humid, sometimes." He admitted. For the first time. "Not a lot." He was quick to add, "And it never impacts my job."

"I'd like to have your hand X-rayed." Blake says, "Just to be sure." He just sounds so earnest, like he's correcting some kind of wrong that it's all Charlie can do to nod his head. Blake ran his thumb over the raised scars again. "Are your hands always this cold?" He asked, frowning.

"Yeah."

The doc put a second hand over the top and held it close to his chest to warm it up.


End file.
